120
PARTISAN REVIEW
CROSS-COUNTRY CAMERA
AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS.
By
Walker Evans. The Museum
of Modern Art.
$2.50.
In these eighty-seven photographs of the South and the Eastern
Seaboard, Walker Evans says, "Here is what I saw." Margaret
Bourke-White's
You Have Seen Their Faces
cries out, "For God's
sake, let's do something about it!" Her skillful, melodramatic articu–
lation of sharecroppers' miseries is the fruit of facility acquired
in
playing-up the spectacular designs of industry. The violent concus–
sion of the Caldwell illustrations is romantic advertising in reverse.
Evans is no propagandist either for heroic enterprise or wretched–
ness. He sometimes directly excites the social conscience, sometimes
implicitly. But clearly the intention is perception objectified. He
is
a poet-historian who, at his best, speaks in terms of such precision
and alarming simplicity as to give his work a universal quality good
for all time. These images of our past and contemporary life, re–
flected through a highly selective and realistic eye, would be the first
choice of a curator planning an indestructible archive for future
anthropologists. Here is the bold and orderly account of disorder, of
shops, junk piles, bedrooms, neighborhoods, fantastic adventures in
architecture and decoration, the monstrous clusters of sub-standard
warrens, the distinctively typical faces of mixed America. They
are familiar, but arrested by Evans's straightforward and ironic lens,
they are essential, not'commonplace.
Plantation gardens, mountain brooks and sleepy valleys do not
interest Evans. Rather he works with "whatever wears man's smudge
and shares man's smell." A cactus table plant struggling out of an
ice cream freezer, an auto-graveyard spilled across a pasture have pic–
torial values for
him
not found in grand views or sophisticated orna–
mentation. From torn bill posters he extracts varieties of non-repre–
sentational design. In a dingy barber shop in Atlanta he discovers
an interior as rich in tones and spatial patterns as the film can record.
In such recordings, which are the photographic equivalent of
the
plastic artist's recasting of given material, Evans makes expressive
the
apparently insignificant aspects of our civilization.
When he is least interesting, he is mute or trivial, never counter–
feit. And his most disturbing characteristic is a detachment so strict
that it seems discharged of humanity. This results in the deperson–
alized quality of a frozen section. Lincoln Kirstein, in an interesting
historical and appreciative essay, refers to Evans's "unsparing frank–
ness" as "a purely protestant attitude". This is the price of sharp and
unsentimental insight, especially in an artist so keenly and exclusively
attentive to man and his monuments. The chief complaint about
these reproductions is that there are so few of them. This sectional
anthology demands that Walker Evans cover the country.
DINSMORE WHEELER.
